The Classics Club Lucky Spin Number is: My list of 20 books for this spin: Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945) The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922) The Once and Future King by T. H. White (1958) A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy (1873) The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf …
The LLL Diaries #1
Now that it's February, I'm diving into my self-education program I'm calling The LLL Diaries. I've created a page to house all my posts for this and you can find that HERE as well as in the menu at the top of my blog. In January I decided to get a head start on my …
CC Spin #43
It’s time for a Classics Club Spin and this one is Spin #43. To play along, you post a list of 20 books from your classics list before Sunday, February 8th. You can click HERE to see my Classics TBR that I pull from. On February 8th, Classics Club will post a number between 1 …
A Look Back at My 2025 Reading Year
Photo by PNW Production on Pexels.com I've finished compiling all my stats for my 2025 reading year; and I am pretty happy with my reading year overall. I started the year off with a bang by having 3 five star reads in January, along with a 4.5 star read and two four star reads. I …
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
Each January, I try to prioritize reading a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro as I slowly work my way through all the novels he has written. This month, my choice was A Pale View of Hills. This is the first novel Ishiguro wrote and I was impressed with his debut work. His masterful writing we see …
Sipsworth By Simon Van Booy
"Helen Cartwright was old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen." ~ Sipsworth (p. 3) After both her husband and son passed, Helen decides to move back to the village where she lived as a child. She just wants to live out what’s left of her life unnoticed and alone with …
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
I first read The Snow Child back in 2017 and was mesmerized by it. The story utterly swept me away. Then in 2021, I read it again. Would this story hold up to multiple readings? And the answer to that was – yes! The mix of magical realism and reality mold together perfectly in this …
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – Review
Snow Country is a melancholic toned story that explores the beauty of nature, transcience, longing in different ways and futile love. Bellazza and I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 19 and it was an interesting read to kick off the challenge. I can't say I loved the book; but I have thought about …
Strange Weather in Tokyo By Hiromi Kawakami
I have had the book Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami for quite some time now and decided to prioritize it this month for my Japanese Literature Challenge reading. It was an interesting read; and it's taken me some time to figure out what I thought about it. Here's the description of it from …
Continue reading Strange Weather in Tokyo By Hiromi Kawakami
The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon
I read The Story of Mankind mainly because it’s on the Newberry Medal Winners list; and I've decided to try to read all of the Newberry Medal winners. But it counts for my Classics Club Challenge too! Yay! I also thought it was a great way to get a quick very general overview of world …
Continue reading The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon
Literary Excursions 
